[LINK] DNS outage?

[Glen Turner]

On 29/07/09 18:41, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> I'll hazard a guess that the bulk of non-Australian "English" content is coming out
> of the United States purely because that is where the large concentration of English
> speaking content is coming from. :)

That's exactly it. Most of Germany's traffic runs through the DE-CIX internet exchange
and never leaves the country. Similarly for Japan.

Australia, NZ, and to a lesser extent South Africa, are pretty unique in being a long
way away from the centre of their language's 'Internet' (in our case, the centre would
be downtown Palo Alto).  [I really must spend a day running our traffic through GeoIP
and doing a nice poster-sized visualisation.]

This leads to us having a set of issues which aren't seen as important by the wider Internet,
but which matter a lot to us. For example, in most of the world TCP performance tuning is
a topic for supercomputer propeller heads, whereas in Australia most PCs require tuning
simply to get the most out of their ADSL capacity.  As another example, the length,
capacity and robustness of undersea links aren't too important for other countries, but
are vital for Australia.

CDNs complicate things, but not as much as you'd think as they are designed to be self-
tuning -- so the German-language content ends up on servers in German because that's where
the demand for German-language content is being seen.

-- 
  Glen Turner   <http://www.gdt.id.au/~gdt/>
  Not speaking for my employer.